Saturday, April 30, 2016

My friend Lou Anders has had a short story published in Boys Life. I used to steal my brother's Boys Life magazines and read all the fiction and cartoons before he even got a chance to glance at them. I still want to read the entire comic adaptation of the Tripods trilogy... I never saw the whole thing.

Ancient footprints are already pretty cool artifacts, but now they are even cooler since professional trackers have been brought in to make sense of them. I love this type of history story... looking at a problem from a different, yet totally obvious, direction.

How about a tale of a very long-running experiment? I've heard of some experiments that have been going for many years, but this is a bit of a surprise. Seeds in bottles, buried in an effort to see how long the seeds would last.

So, Free Comic Book Day is coming. Here's some sneak peeks of Doctor Who comics. I need to figure out what comics we already ordered from DCBS so I know which ones to get when Eric and I go to the store next week.

I stayed up until 2 a.m. reading a book the other night/morning. I haven't done that for ages because I've been too responsible to risk being dead at work, for all the good it did me. But I really enjoyed the book and will be writing about it soon, probably not for tomorrow's reviews, but maybe next Sunday. It was Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon, and I strongly recommend it for any young woman, ages 8-18, who isn't very princess-y or girly and likes snakes and slugs and dirt and work. It's very good.

David Gerrold has a post about Hugo asterisks. I just want to say, the asterisks were there the instant the puppies gamed the Hugos. Putting them into physical form didn't make it any worse, since the damage was already done. On the contrary, the asterisks let some of us have a physical memento of their first time voting in the Hugos (me!) and raised money for a worthy cause. The people who were hurt by the asterisks deserved to be hurt because they are the ones who put the asterisk there in the first place by gaming the Hugo nominations. The fact that they still don't get it only proves the point. And it still amazes me that they are stupid enough to think that people gamed the Hugos before they did. The utter willful ignorance of the puppies is astounding.

Speaking of stupidity, another friend has weighed in on sexism in the comic book industry. As he notes, every woman in the field, fan or professional, has a creep story. I admit I sometimes just shake my head and ignore it, because fighting the creeps is so hard. When you fight it and make a big deal out of it, men tend to roll their eyes and act like you are complaining about something tiny or unimportant. The men who would never dream of behaving bad who therefore cannot fathom that other men might behave bad are actually the worst. They act like you are blaming them for it and get offended. The vast majority of guys have no idea how to respond. My suggestion is to take the complaints seriously and offer both sympathy and support.

And in another burst of stupidity, some people are trying to repeal laws in Washington state that protect transgender people. They are being met with opposition, which is good. Washington won't discriminate. Especially not for people who don't even have a clue what transgender really is and means. Hint: it doesn't change daily and it doesn't mean people are free to assault others, we have laws against that.